This blog explores how music's creative principles and practices can be applied to everyday life and work.

Friday, 7 December 2012

Go back to the original

In
1874 Modest Mussorgsky composed a suite of piano pieces called ‘Pictures at an
Exhibition’, each piece depicting the pictures viewed by a visitor to an art
gallery. In 1922 Maurice Ravel rearranged the suite for full orchestra. Today,
it is this latter version that is best known.

Ravel’s
arrangement is extremely imaginative, showing off his genius for orchestration
and making explicit those things that could only be implied in the original
piano work.

The
brilliance, colour and imagination of the orchestration, however, obscure some
of the valuable characteristics of the original.

The
piano version is very virtuosic. You can see and hear the pianist struggling
with some of the passages. This makes watching and listening to a performance of it a very
physical, visceral experience. The seemingly effortless brilliance of the
orchestral version loses this aspect.

Also,
the suite was written in memory of a recently deceased friend of Mussorgsky’s,
the architect Viktor Hartmann. Arguably, the personal nature of Mussorgsky's
grief is expressed best through the intimate medium of the solo piano rather
than the very public arena of an orchestral performance.

Sometimes
clearing away the rearrangements and modifications that have been made and
added to something over time can reveal original features of forgotten value.

When
you next want to improve a process, or find yourself having to address a problem
that has arisen in a previously trouble free area, peel back the changes that
have occurred to it over time and have a good, detailed look at the original.

Have
various rearrangements and modifications obscured valuable aspects? Could a
refocusing of attention upon the original foundations of a tottering process
help to stabilise, strengthen and even improve it?

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About Charles M Lines

Charles M Lines trained as a musician and studied composition at the Colchester School of Music during the early 1980s. He joined the UK Civil Service in 1984 where he worked for various government departments, eventually specialising in management consultancy, training and development. In 1996 he became a Senior Lecturer at the UK Civil Service College.

At the age of 41 he left the Civil Service to work as an independent management consultant and trainer. He has since been in demand both at home and abroad, providing management consultancy and training events to a very wide range of clients.

He speaks and writes regularly about creative problem solving and how music's creative principles and practices can help us all be more creative in our approach to life and work.